Fujitsu FLEPia Color eBook

By Nick Mokey Published October 19, 2009

Fujitsu FLEPia Color eBook Just when Amazon looked like king of the mountain with its Kindle 2 eBook collecting reams of press coverage, Fujitsu seems to have punched the wind out of the poor thing with the FLEPia – the very first color eBook. Fortunately for Amazon, a number of caveats associated with moving over to full color may make the FLEPia more of a novelty than a true head-to-head competitor with the Kindle.

The FLEPia’s eight-inch screen offers 1024 x 768 resolution and up to 260,000 colors, which is obviously quite a bit more than the new Kindle’s sixteen shades of grey. However, filling the screen with that full spectrum will be no simple task: According to Fast Company, the reader will take eight seconds to refresh in full color. In that time, most users could have the same page printed out in color. Even with the color palette reduced to 64 colors, refresh time remains a sluggish 1.8 seconds. Fujitsu’s own videos seem to confirm this absurdity. Fortunately, color does not seem to significantly diminish battery life, which remains a reasonable 40 hours.

Recommended Videos

Because it actually runs Windows CE, the FLEPia will do a few more tricks than your average electronic reader. Aside from thumbing (patiently) through documents, you’ll be able to surf the Web with it, and it has both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built in. A standard SD slot allows the device to offer up to 4GB of storage.

Right now, the FLEPia remains a Japanese-only release with a price tag of 99,750 Yen. That translates to roughly $1,015 USD, making the color eBook a pricy proposition for all but the most well-off bookworms. Fujitsu has not yet announced whether a North American version will ever be made, but more details are available on the translated version of the company’s press release.

Fujitsu FLEPia Color eBook

Fujitsu FLEPia Color eBook

Former Editor in Chief

As Digital Trends’ Editor in Chief, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team covering every gadget under the sun, along with…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Robot dogs were supposed to help humans. Now humans are being asked to babysit them

One startup offered $20 an hour to walk its robots, with some heavy lifting required when the dogs overheat

GO2 robot dog

San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.

Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.

Emerging Tech

Forget smartwatches; this smart bed could soon help keep you safe from being a fall risk

Who needs another wearable when your mattress could help spot fall risks?

Bed

Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.

The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.

Emerging Tech

Anthropic’s sensitive internal data was exposed, and AI helped make it happen

Even the company behind Claude isn't immune to AI-powered security threats, as researchers discovered some worrying vulnerabilities.

Claude Anthropic Featured

AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.

The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.